The App Store and Google Play may not be kings forever. If we look to Asia, we can see evidence that Web-based apps may be creeping closer to finding dominance on smartphones. And no-one should be more interested in the trend than Facebook.

Last week, South Korea’s Kakao Talk announced that it is taking its new gaming platform global. Kakao Talk is a mobile messaging app that has been downloaded more than 65 million times worldwide. In Korea, it is the dominant mobile experience, to the point where “Ka Talk” has been normalized to mean “mobile chat.” It opened its gaming platform in Korea just three months ago, and it has already registered numbers so impressive that any small-time game developer hoping to reach the Korean market should consider thinking “Kakao first, App Store and Google Play later.”

Three games on the “Kakao Game” platform have already been downloaded more than 10 million times: Anipang took just 39 days to reach the milestone; Candypang took 28; and Dragon Flight, 26. Since the launch of Kakao Game, Anipang has increased its income by 400 times, and Dragon Flight by 2,800 times, according to Kakao. Meanwhile, more than 80 million games have been downloaded at a rate of 3.58 games per subscriber.

Kakao Game screenshot

These are numbers that Facebook should be taking a close look at. The social network’s App Center has been seeing 150 million monthly users, but that’s out of a total of 1 billion members, and spread across all platforms. It also hosts more than 600 apps on the center, including more than 130 games that have more than 1 million users. Kakao Game, meanwhile, has just 31 games and a total userbase in Korea of about 50 million. So its 82 million downloads from 23 million unique users is more than significant when compared to the Facebook App Center, especially when you consider that it is a mobile-only platform. (By the way, KakaoTalk also has 3 million users in the US.)

Kakao Talk, like Tencent’s WeChat, is a truly mobile-native app, which means it has been able to build for the mobile era from the ground up in a way that Facebook hasn’t. While Facebook’s mobile experience is fragmented across its Messages, Camera, and all-in-one apps, both Kakao Talk and WeChat integrate a broad range of social and communications experiences within one platform that doesn’t bother wasting time with a desktop Web version. Both apps started with chat at the center of their experiences, but they have expanded to include photo sharing, a social graph, an advertising platform, a gaming platform, and also a fledgling ecommerce platform.

Kakao has also announced that next year it will launch an online music and book store called Kakao Page. The service will provide tools for artists, writers, musicians, and others to sell and market their content direct to Kakao Talk users. It plans to take a 20 percent cut of sales after giving 30 percent to Google or Apple’s app stores, and 50 percent to the content creators. That will put it a step ahead of Facebook in terms of serving as a marketplace.

They might not have the name recognition or reach of Facebook, but in their home markets both Kakao Talk and WeChat, which now has 200 million users, are pushing forward with innovations in a way that ties social and mobile together for great economic potential. They may still be tied to Google Play and the App Store, but they also provide an alternative route around those stores for both developers and users. For many, Kakao Talk and WeChat are becoming the de facto mobile experience. The same can’t be said for Facebook anywhere.

Korea has led the way before in social, particularly at the start of the millennium with social networks SayClub and Cyworld, both of which had millions of users and online economies long before Mark Zuckerberg started hacking together Facemash. Facebook eventually supplanted them both, but the arrival of the Age of Mobile has again wiped the slate clean. In China, WeChat (known there as Weixin) doesn’t have to worry about competing with Facebook, which is blocked in the country, but it has already started eroding the popularity of Sina Weibo, the Twitter-Facebook hybrid that had dominated social networking in the country in recent years.

So far KakaoTalk and WeChat have few analogues in the US, with Voxer perhaps the closest in resemblance. In the US, it would be mighty difficult for a newcomer to swoop in with such an app and expect to gain dominance. Facebook is too entrenched for that. But that doesn’t mean that Facebook should sit back on its heels and watch as its Asian counterparts do smarter things on mobile, and with greater speed. The Age of Mobile has created a new social world, and few are doing it better than these two feisty players from the East.

Booker, which helps service businesses better engage with customers online, has raised $35 million in a Series C round led by Medina Capital, with participation from strategic investor First Data, Jump Capital, and Signal Peak Ventures, as well as existing investors. The New York City company now sees 3 million appointments booked monthly across 73 countries in 11 languages on its platform. [via Booker]

PCH, a company which “helps entrepreneurs turn ideas into brands and makes a variety of consumer tech products for major companies such as Apple,” has acquired Fab for a reported $15 million in cash and stock. Fab previously had a $1 billion valuation and raised $325 million. It will “continue to focus on design” at PCH. [Source: Bloomberg]

BlackBerry has unveiled several new smartphones at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, including the touchscreen-focused BlackBerry Leap and a device with a “dual curve slider,” in addition to its keyboard-equipped products. [Source: New York Times]

March 3, 2015

“I hope to have a bigger presence in the tech world. I love coming up with different app ideas, and I have a few more that are coming out. Once you get started and you have this creative bug of ideas that you want to get out, I feel like I’ve partnered with the right team, and now I have the creative outlet to make that happen. I’m happy that people are into it and perceiving it well. I just want to create more apps.”

PayPal is planning to acquire Paydiant, the company behind CurrentC — retailers’ answer to Apple Pay — for a reported $280 million. No word yet on how the companies will mix, nor if Paydiant’s relationship with the industry group behind CurrentC will remain intact. [Source: Re/code]

Microsoft is in talks to acquire Prismatic, a news aggregation service that uses natural language processing to recommend content in which its users might be interested, according to a report from TechCrunch. Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook are all said to have expressed similar interest in the company. (Which is surely a sign of actual interest and not at all an attempt by someone at the company to make it seem like a hot commodity — right?) [Source: TechCrunch]

March 2, 2015

“Just wanted to confirm that the rumors are true — I’m excited to be running Google’s Photos and Streams products! It’s important to me that these changes are properly understood to be positive improvements to both our products and how they reach users.”

Samsung has announced Samsung Pay, a competitor to the Apple Pay product included in Apple’s latest iPhones, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The feature will allow new Samsung Galaxy S6 owners who use MasterCard to pay for goods with their phones. It’s not clear when other credit card companies will be supported. [Source: The Guardian]

Google’s product head, Sundar Pichai, said during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today that the company’s wireless network will debut in the United States in the “coming months.” Asked about the network’s features, Pichai said that it wants to “experiment” like it has with Android, and that it has carrier partners with which it’s working. [Source: TechCrunch]